


ghost in the machine.

by lifeincantos



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: (possibly), Alternate Universe - Ghost Hunters, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Body Horror, Horror, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, Nonlinear Narrative, Southern Gothic, Unhappy Ending, all of it's Kind of a Metaphor so take that as you will, extremely abstract concept, the Implied Sexual Content is loving and enthusiastic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-19
Updated: 2019-10-19
Packaged: 2020-12-24 11:29:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21098750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lifeincantos/pseuds/lifeincantos
Summary: when you open a door, you have to close it. or you have to get ready for what comes through, and the ways you can haunt each other.// the one where adam and shiro hunt ghosts for a living but the ghosts and the hunting are mostly metaphors. happy halloween.





	ghost in the machine.

i. 

“If there is anyone in this room with us, please turn off the flashlight right here on my left.” 

The room is sweltering, and both of the lights in both of the flashlights flicker right on the edge of off and on but neither of them turn off. The two of them wait for a second, they wait another second and another three and nothing happens. Yellow light is cast fractured and dappled around the bedroom, but it never guts. 

“Is that all you have in you? Oh come on, that’s nothing.” 

“You don’t need to antagonize it.” 

“I think I do.” 

Shiro is grinning. It cuts his lips in the flickering halo of half light. Adam watches him with a half distant sort of interest painted across his face. His eyes turn from dark to light whenever the flashlights flicker. 

“I only mean,” Adam clarifies, “It doesn’t seem like a particularly strong ghost. You think you can change that?” 

“Well, now,” Shiro says, goading, grinning. “I can try.” 

They try, of course, because that is what they do. They record their efforts, they call out to ghosts, and they try, and they’ve done it all before. And they’ll do it again. July breathes through its sticky pulse and most of the rest of West Liberty, Kentucky sleeps through their attempts to do what they do. 

The footage, at least, can be made exciting. That’s another thing they do each time, so it’s another thing not to worry about. Whether or not Adam believes they are alone (as in, _ alone _, alone) it doesn’t make a difference. They are at least alone for tonight — here, it’s only them and the summer heat. He watches Shiro’s face a little, does so distracted and easy. Patterns are easy and this is a pattern. 

After radio silence, literal and figurative, they pack up the bedroom. The kitchen is silent, too. Shiro asks, “Come on — not even a cabinet? A little glass, right here off the edge of the counter? It’d be nothing to knock it off.” 

“I keep telling you,” Adam says (maybe they’ll cut it in with voice over — green cast shots of night vision mapped furniture and Adam’s skepticism laced throughout) “It’s not going to happen.” 

“Don’t kill my hope,” Shiro says, and it hits Adam like a laugh. 

“At least something would be dead,” Adam replies. For a moment they let the silence be, then they both cough their way onto a chuckle, a real chuckle. 

Shiro turns the camera onto his face. It’s all cut out in shadows; Adam watches them move as Shiro talks. “You can’t say we didn’t give it our best try.” 

“A real ol’ college of a try,” Adam adds. Shiro’s lips twitch. It might be the lamplight, the summer swell, but it looks like his eyes shine. 

“Practically the whole university. If Clara is here, she’s not saying a word tonight.” 

“At this point it could really only be our personalities driving her away. And we can’t change those.” 

“Not with that attitude. Extreme makeover: ghost hunting edition?” 

“The paranormal dating game.” 

“Say yes to the investigation.” 

When they leave, close to dawn, the Clara Wilson house is quiet as a grave behind them. 

ii. 

When you open a door, you have to close it. 

You can do it by burning things, or by saying goodbye, or by saying their name. You can walk backwards across a threshold or cover a mirror. But the safest way to ensure that you close a door is not to open one. 

Static rushes through the radio waves and shatters the silence. Shiro fumbles with the spirit box in his alarm, and Adam makes a sound that’s part admonishing and part wickedly amused. 

“If they didn’t know we were here before — ”

“Oh, shut up.” 

Ads and music and knife sharp white noise flicker one second after another. That’s the idea of a spirit box: you let a radio flip through its stations so fast that any continuous noise must be more than a coincidence. Maybe there’s something about the chaos of the stations in between broadcast range that reach a place other things can’t; maybe it’s that everyone, even ghosts, love to hear their voice get some radio play. 

_ Ksh - ksh - what - ksh - a minor chord - ksh - ksh _ \- 

Father Reyes had explained to them earlier about the sanctity of the barrier between life and death. In the towering, arched halls of Mission San Juan Capistrano, the warnings were like eddies of dust caught in sunlight: strange, unwelcome, beautiful. Shiro had recorded his instructions, but even if they would make a chilling, atmospheric underscore to the shots of the house cast in night vision and set against the dark California streets, Shiro had still listened and he remembers the lilt of Father Reyes’ voice as he says: 

_ Look, but don’t touch_. 

And: 

_ Think of it this way. If you can reach them, they can reach you_. 

Shiro has never put stock in demons, if he’s being honest. It’s like a concept he cannot skate his fingers against and understand by touch, by sight, in the hollows of his bones. They’re not real the way the plastic and metal in his hands is real, or the way Adam’s voice is real even if he’s only remembering it. 

The recorded footage is grainy first, in the single light flooding the room, then wide and green and constantly shifting with spotlights and shadows when they turn their flashlights off. Shiro fumbles a little with the box, again, and the camera both, so Adam takes the camera. One day they’ll get the hang of this; this is only their first time. 

“Apparently,” Shiro tells the camera, the hypothetical audience that might lie beyond it one day, “Demons are notorious for taking on the appearances of others. Anything that might lure you into trusting them.” 

“It makes sense,” Adam says mildly. “I don’t think I’d trust anything that looked, well. Demonic, for one.” 

“You wouldn’t?” 

“Not until I got to know them at the very least.” 

“That’s reasonable.” 

Father Reyes had had a genial air around him, as if he were in on some vast knowledge that skated to the edge of an inside joke — like he understood something comforting. He spoke of touching the world beyond this one with reverence but also surety, somber belief without the paralyzing fear of the unknown. He’d laughed at their jokes — _ a little charitably _ , Adam might say with his biting humor. _ No, no, _ Shiro would reply, linking their arms together all devil may care (and maybe they will find out tonight). _ We’re the funniest people I know_. 

_ Modest, too_. 

Shiro glances at Adam’s face, what he can see of it that’s not obscured by the camera, and they share a furtive smile. Shiro smiles more at Adam’s than he does at what they’re smiling about. 

“For years,” Shiro says to the camera, “Residents of this home in San Juan Capistrano, California, have reported feeling distinctly not alone in many of the rooms here. Some have claimed to experience the same dreams for months on end, of a little girl standing in the middle of the bedroom as if she had run in from some nightmare.” 

“Does she say anything?” 

“I haven’t heard stories about her speaking, but there have been ones about hearing a deep, grating voice right when you walk through the front door.” 

“So, the threshold?” 

“You know, yeah. Exactly. Good observation.” 

“I try.” 

The flashlights are set up on the kitchen counter, switches set right between off and on, and their evidence is inconclusive. _ Turn the left flashlight off if you’re here with us_, Shiro tells the room, and the light flickers off. But when he says _ turn the right flashlight off if you hate us, if you want us to leave_, it does nothing. Then both of them gut out all at once. A breeze stirs, it rolls one of the flashlights into the other and in the half darkness, they make a metal clinking noise. 

“Did you feel that?” Shiro asks Adam and the camera both, voice glimmering with energy. 

“The breeze?” 

“No, no, like a — a hand or something.” 

“Something touched you?” 

“I don’t know. I guess, well — we’re physically the only ones in here.” 

“Supposedly.” 

“It just felt like a hand, y’know when — someone presses their hand against your back?” 

“Maybe we made a friend.” 

“_Or_.” 

Mission San Juan Capistrano is overgrown with a riot of wildflowers in colors that had bled more color the closer the sun dipped to the horizon — reds and violets and startling yellows. Father Reyes had walked with them a little, and as they passed through the courtyard they shook the leaves and the petals with their presence. The flowers had grown so long and wild and free that they bent over the pathway, making it impossible to avoid disturbing them as they talked and moved. It’s spring, but hot for it, and the cooling evening had begun to kick up a breeze that accompanied them. 

_ There are many ways to open a door_, Father Reyes had said. Asking, summoning, destroying something that an old soul cherishes. 

_ What about a ouija board? _ Shiro had asked. Adam had sighed a little, but Father Reyes had only smiled. 

_ Well_, he’d said. _ I don’t know about you, but I’d be a little offended if someone tried to contact me with something they’d bought at a toy store_. 

_ Ah_, Shiro had laughed. _ That’s really fair_. 

iii. 

They were nineteen when they started talking about traveling the country. 

“I’ve only been to like, four states,” Shiro had said, some of the voice that Adam had known of him cracking through the veil wrapped around it for the last year. Adam had sat up a little straighter on the bed, watched him carefully with a laser focused gaze at odds with the soft set of his mouth. 

“I’ve been to… maybe five. Six. I don’t remember all of them.” 

“There’s a lot of world out there.” 

Shiro’s voice had the quality of watching the middle distance, stuck halfway between two nowheres and untouchable. But that was silly and sentimental, because at the very least, he was here, in the room with Adam. Surely that was enough. All they need is one step; the rest they can make, together. 

“So I hear,” Adam said mildly. Shiro’s fingers picked at the blanket, then they inched forward, palm up, fingers curled into it, barely asking. 

Adam settled his hand against Shiro’s anyway. 

iv. 

By all logic, the car shouldn’t drive as well as it does. They made it from Phoenix to Joshua Tree without breaking down once, a disaster on which Adam would have put money at the start of their journey. The entire way down they kicked up what looked like all the dust in the desert, but here they are: endless sky, desert trees, a waiting campground and them in one piece. Adam hears Shiro close the driver’s side door behind him and waits until he settles beside him, leaning against the car and looking up at the Milky Way stretched forever above them. 

“I never get tired of it,” Shiro says, and Adam viscerally remembers how his voice was four years ago — small, withered, tired. It’s changed so gradually that Adam realizes he can’t pinpoint when the turn came — when Shiro’s voice came back to life. Or started some new life. He has his arms crossed against his chest and he contemplates letting them down so that he take Shiro’s hand, but Shiro makes it easy for him. Adam feels the weight of his natural arm come warm and familiar, slinging against his shoulders and pulling him in just enough that Adam can comfortably lean a little of his weight against Shiro’s side. 

“Neither do I,” Adam says, but he’s not looking up at the stars anymore. 

Shiro’s face is illuminated by their light, his eyes just two more stars — bright like they’re reaching up, back towards home. Something aching sits in the pit of Adam’s stomach at the sight of it, but he refuses to stop looking at Shiro. 

v. 

Of course, neither of them has camped before, so the morning after Joshua Tree is decidedly unglamorous. Adam curses the ache in his neck the whole drive up to Los Angeles and vows never to sleep outside again. 

vi.

Forty minutes outside Buckhannon the night swells with crickets, with the breeze through the grass and the wheat stalks down the road, the crickets and the starlight. They have a tent set up, but they are both sprawled out on a blanket in the grass, watching the night sky cut out in a jagged circle above them and above the clearing in the trees. It’s cooler than the day but it’s not cool, but that doesn’t seem to matter because Shiro has his fingers tangled with Adam’s all the same. 

His lips are still a little heavy with whiskey but Shiro’s head is clear. He runs his thumb against Adam’s fingers. 

“D’you think we’ll see the Greenbrier Ghost?” Shiro asks. 

“We’re not in Greenbrier,” Adam points out. 

“Still. We’re all along the same forest. Maybe ghosts can travel the woods.” 

“We should be on the lookout.” Adam’s voice is wrapped around that wry, sharp edged humor. 

“For a woman who is trapped in this world,” Shiro says, dropping his voice a little, “Betrayed by her true love, killed and buried by his hand. Reaching out to anyone who will listen — asking them to understand what happened to her. Unable to bear the thought of spending eternity in the obscurity of her murder.” 

Adam has drawn closer in the interim. Shiro’s entire neck tingles when Adam murmurs against it, “You should do this for a living, or something.” 

Years ago, they’d left college behind and struggled with their campsite in Joshua Tree and had been so thoroughly defeated by the outdoors that they hadn’t spoken to each other for a full day. Sometimes Shiro thinks about that — especially in times like these, when all that exists are the stars and the moon, the warm breeze and soft grass, the chorus of crickets and Adam pressed against his neck like his outline was made to fit there. Easy. Real. Right. 

Shiro shudders, sure that Adam can feel the way it rolls down his whole spine. Good. There’s so little he doesn’t want to give Adam, all the time. 

“I think our viewers would have to agree with you,” he says, curling in and ghosting his lips against Adam’s temple. He feels rather than sees Adam’s lips quirk up into a grin, and just like every time, Shiro memorizes the sensation, as if he can make it live inside him — as if he can make it so that he can summon the feeling at will and wrap himself in it every moment that Adam is not pressed against him. 

“Are you finally recognizing your worth?” Adam’s voice glints with humor. “No offense, but the noble humility is a little much, sometimes.” 

“Cruel.” Shiro raises himself up on an elbow, but the distance is momentary. He drinks in the way he can see Adam’s face now, and the brief surprise that flickers across it before Shiro turns more — enough to brace his other hand on Adam’s other side, lower himself until he is almost, almost lying against his chest. Then, half joking, half not, he starts, “Is it really — ” 

“_Oh_, my god.” Adam reaches up, skates his hand against Shiro’s ribs without pulling him in — a reassurance, a challenge, an invitation for Shiro to make the move. This is their rhythm; waiting for the green light, Adam’s invitation for Shiro’s initiation enough to drive Shiro a little delirious. But the game is fun, too. Shiro waits, a thrilling sort of punishment, until Adam makes a noise in the back of his throat and has to say, “Kiss me.” 

Shiro kisses him. He tastes a little like whiskey, but mostly like Adam. His lips move slow at first, then quicker. Adam makes another noise and Shiro rewards him by grazing his teeth against Adam’s lower lip, parting for a quick breath before nipping again. Shiro feels Adam start to reciprocate but Shiro is too fast, breaking to press a kiss against the sharp line of Adam’s jaw — kisses, actually. Plenty of them, worshiping the bone of his jaw until he is lavishing attention against the notch below his ear. 

_ Shiro_, Adam breathes his name, all that glittering humor and sardonic distance stripped from him. This is Adam, breathing below him, matching Shiro, offering his neck. This is Adam, bereft of all the things he places between himself and the world. This is Adam, wanting. 

Lips trailing the whole way, Shiro presses a litany of affection down, down the swanning of Adam’s throat, against the dip of his collar bone, marking the column his shoulder with wordless devotion. Nosing off the fabric of Adam’s shirt, Shiro continues his exploration, mapping by feel the rise of Adam’s chest, readjusting until he can go at it from the other way, silently encouraging Adam to free himself of the shirt altogether as he whispers his adoration in the only language worth anything. The pathway descends slowly, bit by bit, Shiro lingering at the plane of Adam’s stomach, the beautiful concave of his hip. 

Somewhere along the way Adam’s hand found Shiro’s hair. His fingers clutch at it idly, as if he only remembers sometimes to tug gently through it. Sparks like a building campfire kick up at every pull and cascade down the curving length of Shiro’s spine, and it’s _ good _ but it could be _ better_. It could be Adam forgetting to do anything himself entirely, because Shiro has done enough to fill the entirety of his attention with pleasure. 

“Shiro.” Adam’s voice is a blooming August Deptford Pink. 

“Tell me what you want,” Shiro breathes against his hip, and feels the shudder that runs through him. 

It takes Adam a moment; every second is as perfumed and omnipresent as summer honeysuckle. “ — I want you.” 

Shiro presses another kiss, breathing over the goosebumping flesh just above the line of Adam’s jeans. “You always have me.” 

After that, Shiro manages to do what he wanted and renders them both silent. As far as they know, they’re the only ones haunting their stretch of the national park that night. 

vii. 

Maybe it ends with all the lights in the basement gutting out and Shiro standing frozen to the spot where they’ve lazily marked the edges of a pentagram with novelty stuffed animals from the haunted tours gift shop in the heart of New Orleans. 

“Shiro, please — _ please _ this isn’t _ funny _ — ” it’s not, it’s not funny at all. Shiro wouldn’t think this was funny, and Adam knows that. But what else can he do? How do you reconcile the nonsensical, untouchable world of ghosts and demons with Shiro’s eyes pooling black, his muscles rigid, the light swallowed by his prosthetic when it should be reflecting it back, dull and ordinary? 

_ Please_, because what else do you say when someone is so close and so sharply, finitely out of reach? _ Please, please don’t do this_. 

“Shiro — ” 

“_He’s not here_.” 

His voice is broken like a static wrought spirit box, grating and terrible and Adam’s throat locks. All he wants to do is argue — _ don’t leave me, how could you tempt something so dangerous, why couldn’t you be careful _ — but all he manages is “_Please_.” 

More unfathomable than the sight of a demonic possession is a world where Shiro doesn’t relent, immediately, to the things that Adam asks for. 

_ Please, please_. 

viii. 

When Shiro is fourteen and his little brother is seven and their family is on vacation, their father takes them out for a little late night stargazing. It’s chilly, but Shiro suspects that Keith has claimed his lap as a seat is because he’s seven and tired and has always enjoyed closeness, and not because he’s cold. For his part, Shiro wraps his arm around Keith and rests his chin light enough on the top of his head so that his brother doesn’t complain about it digging in. Together, they watch the Milky Way all unfolded above them. 

Dad points out Cassiopeia and Leo and Scorpius and Shiro helps Keith reach out and mime tracing them with his forefinger. They listen to stories about the stars, and then make up some of their own. Keith laughs and says _ if I was a warrior, I’d ride a lion into battle_. 

_ Yeah_, Shiro says, _ but scorpions have armor and poison, so wouldn’t they be cooler? _

_ No! _

_ Okay, okay_, Shiro says, rubbing his knuckles gently into Keith’s scalp. _ You win_. 

_ Duh — ugh, Takashi knock it off! _

Dad laughs, a sound like the way a cluster of fireflies looks lighting up the tall grass. 

ix. 

Maybe it ends with Shiro placing his hand on the steamed up mirror, where another handprint has already cut through the condensation, a little thinner than his, a little longer. He presses his palm to line up with the other and feels the warmth and as much as he tries, he can’t make it not feel human and tangible and familiar enough to splinter all of the bones that make up his ribs. 

_ You’re not real_, he says. His lip is bloody, and his teeth are bloody. _ You’re not real_. 

Because none of it ever was. Because you can’t hear a voice on a spirit box of someone who’s gone. 

x. 

It’s dull out, but it’s not really overcast and it’s certainly not raining. August is a tumult of high and low pressure that builds and builds and sometimes builds into nothing. That’s what they are left with today: stuck between light and dark, the smell of wood, incense, grass. Someone gives a speech, but it’s not Shiro. All he does all day is hold Keith’s hand. For an eleven year old, Keith has showed remarkable patience, remarkable silence. 

When he is approached, Shiro answers with a nod, or with a vague gesture — a wave or something like it with his free hand. His expression is carved of stone today — never once flickering with a stray shadow, with a notion of something beyond distant, stable, quiet. 

He only stays at the grave as long as he thinks he ought to, then he pulls Keith away with him as they make their way toward the car. Neither of them say a word. 

Briefly, Adam is at his side. They don’t say anything either. But when Adam takes his hand, Shiro feels a tidal wave of trembles lance up the length of his forearm and down his spine and he lets go immediately. 

Maybe he knows that if he lingers, he will shake until he falls apart. 

Or maybe he just doesn’t want to know. 

xi. 

Maybe it ends with Shiro yelling wordless and desperate, _ no, no, damn it this isn’t happening _ — clawing himself up onto his palms, onto his knees, crawling across the basement floor in Tonopah, his voice bleeding as his vision clears, _ Adam, please _ — 

There are things you can’t not know when you see them. Shiro is more familiar with Adam’s face than he is with almost anything else in the world and when he turns to where Adam has fallen he knows that he is looking at a stranger. They have carefully fit Adam’s features against their own, molded themselves to fill out his curves and cling to his hollows, adorned themselves with shadows and half light from the flickering flashlight still rolling across the cement floor the way Adam might have. 

But it’s not the dark, nearly-black blood pooling at the corners of his eyes or the way his mouth is open at an unnatural angle that chills Shiro — it's the expression on his face, alive and so far from blank but refusing to recognize Shiro. It is simply this not-Adam, wholly and irrevocably made a stranger in the single moment that Shiro had looked away. In the one moment he'd taken a hit for Shiro that Shiro was sure - so sure, so always sure - he could have taken himself. 

“Why — ”

Shiro is not listening to himself. The words lash against the back of his teeth and wrench open his jaw. His hands scrape bloody on the rough floor and he gets close enough to touch but he does not touch. From here, Shiro can see that Adam’s eyes have gone entirely white with some all consuming, ethereal glow, but it’s no more horrifying than anything else — than the strange position his neck has been wrenched into, than the slow blinks and the staccato-steady rhythm of his breathing. 

Because none of it is as horrifying as the way Adam looks at him as if Shiro isn’t Shiro. 

“I don’t understand, when did you — ” _ I could have handled it, I could have fought it — when did you stop trusting me_. 

Demon, no demon, anything that exists beyond the plane of existence they know, Shiro will fight all of it barehanded. He will rend this thing from its mooring until it is destroyed by him and him alone. 

But the problem is he doesn’t know how to get Adam to recognize him, so he doesn’t know how to start. 

xii. 

Music fills every bar on the street and this one is no different. But even if they’ve been in Nashville for two days and spent one and a half of them editing and uploading their investigation at the Union Station Hotel, this bar feels like theirs. It hosts the same decor as probably most everyplace, but that doesn’t make the brass stars and rich, deep wooden counters and leather and copper embellishments any less aesthetically pleasing. Shiro stretches a little beside him, and Adam hears a decisive _ pop _ as Shiro rolls both of his shoulders. 

“We need to start consolidating our equipment,” he says, but it’s not so much a complaint as it is a conversation. Adam huffs a little laughing sound. 

“The curses of fame, I suppose.” 

“Something like that. And whose idea was it to get cowboy boots? It’s been like, forty eight hours and they’re still not broken in.” 

“Oh, but _ Partner_.” Adam affects a little lilt — maybe more Georgian than Tennessean, but he’s rewarded all the same when Shiro’s lips pull into a grin and he does that thing where his eyes flash and it means a flush is on its way to paint across his features. The moment he holds out a hand Shiro takes it as if there is no other way to be. Behind the cage of his ribs, Adam’s heart throbs heavy in its pulse. 

“Hey,” he says, pulling Shiro against him. Shiro’s more than grinning now — the smile reaches his eyes and he glows with it. 

“Hey,” Shiro says back. 

“Before we get a drink — ”

“Hard earned.” 

“Hard earned,” Adam agrees, “I think they’re playing our song.” 

Shiro stares at him for a moment, brows up, then laughs. “Funny, I was thinking the same thing.” 

There’s no real dance floor but there’s a space between the counter and the booths in the back and they’re far from the only couple or group with the same idea. More than half of the bar is twirling to the twanging melody plucked out on guitar and soft snare drum. Following the ebb and flow of their rhythm, Adam pulls Shiro into the heart of the crowd, effortlessly spinning them both until they fall into step. 

It smells like Jim Beam and leather and flannel, and Shiro’s tea-scented shampoo whenever they press close. Adam presses their cheeks together with each pass, and as they sway and spin, Shiro’s gaze grows more heavy lidded and singularly focused. If anyone cared to look, and then cared to think about what they saw when they looked, they might just say that they were in love. 

But there’s no one else here, now. It’s just them — Shiro’s hand in his, the soft flannel of his shirt brushing against Adam’s wrist, the way his lips are parted just so, trusting and warm. Around them, brass stars swirl like a galaxy deep in space and far away, and Adam tightens his hold against the small of Shiro’s back. 

They meet each other’s gaze, flush and unafraid. Adam tries to say with his eyes_ I see you, I know you_. _ I’m here_. 

It is the least he can do when he feels so held, so seen, so known in turn. 

xiii. 

Shiro is on Adam’s bed in their dorm-owned apartment, knees drawn up to his chest. He cannot look Adam’s way but he feels him in the same visceral way he feels the way he threw his phone across the bed and it burns there like a beacon of all of his failure and every elephant he has studiously avoided discussing for months. 

Adam says nothing, and Shiro doesn’t know what’s worse: his careful silence, or his careful refraining from inviting Shiro to take hold of his hand. 

Something dark and viscous has been laying layer after sedimentary layer in the pit of Shiro’s stomach for longer than he cares to say. He knows when it started, but it’s the same as the funeral, isn’t it? If he touches that livewire of a problem, he won’t be able to put back together the pieces that tremble into their own destruction. 

But this is Adam. This is Adam with his keen eye and warm hands and the way he lights up when Shiro’s done something to please him, Adam with his steadiness and his intelligence and the way he is always, _ always _ strong. He’s not Shiro — terrible, selfish, cowardly. He’s Adam and because he’s Adam, he deserves better. 

Which should be honesty. But it’s a fight because Shiro can see what might happen if he opens his mouth and truth comes out, how the inky darkness in him will come up, too, and it will poison all of Adam’s light. 

“ — I tried to call my Dad.” In the end, it doesn’t matter what Adam deserves, Shiro’s truth or his protective silence. Shiro just can’t lie to him. “I — it’s — ”

“ — It’s okay,” Adam says, his voice so small, and Shiro _ hates himself _ with a visceral, burning passion for making Adam’s voice so small. He claws his fingers into his knees. 

“You shouldn’t have to — ”

“No — ”

“It’s not your — ”

“_ Takashi_.” Adam’s voice brokers no argument. Shiro cannot look up at him, and it’s a disservice but he is met, suddenly, with a rush of safety he hadn’t realized he’d been searching for desperately for months, ever since the phone call that took him and made him into something broken and hastily patched back together, took away his parents without putting them back together. Now Shiro’s useless and angry and lost and terribly selfish; he’s something that is of no use to a brother who deserves to have his parents instead of the thing that Shiro has become; he’s something that is of no use to the man he’s been in love with since their second year of high school.

But Adam says his name with that familiar surety and Shiro knows, aching and frantic and stubborn, that in this moment, he is safe. 

Adam deserves better than the black hole that Shiro has become, but maybe he doesn’t know that because he says, “I’m right here.” 

Shiro’s body snaps like a rubber band pulled too taut; tremors wrack his arms, strangle his throat, claw their way down his spine, attack his ribs. He is caught in their storm and can do nothing except press his forehead against his folded arms and try to remember how to breathe. 

This time, Adam doesn’t hesitate. He is not the kind of careful that bruises Shiro — he is just Adam, confident and caring as he places his hands on Shiro’s arm and his back. Shiro shakes harder, jaw aching as the confession wrests itself from his unyielding lips. 

“I didn’t even cry at the _ funeral _ — I dream about them and when I do I push them away — Keith, I think he hates — I just — what kind of monster doesn’t cry at a _ funeral? _” 

Adam presses closer. His hands tighten their hold, and when he speaks, he’s breathing the words against the shell of Shiro’s ear. “You are not a monster.” 

“Adam — ”

“_You are not a monster_.” 

_ How do you know _ , Shiro wants to ask, but he also doesn’t. Because that selfish part of him is the human part of him and Adam’s touch and his words drape over the raw, exposed knot of nerves that Shiro has become, and the relief might be undeserved but it’s so heady that Shiro is dizzy with it. He curls in tighter against himself, and in doing so manages to lean a little closer to Adam. It’s as much reciprocation as he can manage, and it’s not enough but he still _ wants _ so he still _ asks_: 

“Please — _ please _ don’t go. Adam, _ please _ — ” 

“I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.” 

xiv. 

There are many ways to open a door, but all of them start by just asking something that you want a response to. 

xv.

Maybe it ends with graduation looming in just a few weeks, all the way back when. With something between them that should have been a question but wound up an ultimatum. Shiro doesn’t watch Adam’s back as he walks away, neither of them meet each other’s gaze in the interim. They only stand helpless as the end inches closer with every passing day, unable to find the path to the world where they work things out. 

xvi. 

Or maybe it doesn’t. 

**Author's Note:**

> i love this pairing so much that it was genuinely, physically painful to write an unhappy ending for them, even if it's Ambiguous and Might Not Be. anyway! i have latched too firmly onto this pairing but it's halloween time™ & i wanted to write something unironically chilling. 
> 
> i'm assuming the audience for this fic will be really niche so please, please, please for my sanity, please drop a comment, thx. 
> 
> [playlist link.](https://open.spotify.com/user/matsuokis/playlist/6t7z03AZpOWbf4ssXD5rF4?si=xk3U4jUyRseXOm3rgWtksg)
> 
> [@disasterganes on tumblr.](https://disasterganes.tumblr.com)


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